Police Attempt to Nip Threats to Celebrities in the Bud

One man writes letters threatening to murder Mayor Tom Bradley unless he ends three-day holiday weekends for city employees.

Another threatens to enter markets and poison the San Fernando Valley’s food supply unless the city pays him $2 million.

And a third man, previously found not fit to stand trial for murder and sent to a state hospital for the criminally insane, threatens a major producer. He wants to be cast as the star of the producer’s next movie.

The man sentenced to three years in prison last week for threatening to shoot KNBC-TV newscaster Kelly Lange is far from unique. The rifle-toting woman who recently barricaded herself in the unoccupied Studio City house belonging to actress Sharon Gless is not unusual either.

In fact, nearly every month the Los Angeles Police Department investigates individuals who threaten celebrities, politicians or public property.

Many of these incidents never come to public attention because the person making the threats commits no crime or isn’t caught.

Police who investigate the threats often start with only an unsigned letter or a secretary’s recollection of a short, unsettling phone call. They depend largely on instincts to protect those threatened and to catch those writing bothersome notes or making intrusive phone calls.

“If I think there is any possibility or any hint that there could be criminal action, I will have it investigated right away,” said William Booth, commander of the Los Angeles Police Department’s press relations unit, who often receives complaints from celebrities about threats.

“Sometimes the threats are explicit, sometimes they are not. You might have to read between the lines, but you cannot take a chance that a threat is not there,” Booth said.

The police visit the threatened person to investigate the intrusion. If the identity of the writer is available and if it’s possible a crime will be committed, Booth may have a police officer visit the writer.

“You let them know they are getting very close to violating the law,” Booth said. “Some of the language they are using, they are getting carried away. The bottom line is, ‘Hey, knock this off.’ And often it works.

“Sometimes the only threat is to the sender, like, ‘I’m going to hurt myself if you don’t do such and such.’ We pay attention to those, too.”

A person can be accused of a misdemeanor if there is an intentional threat to kill or seriously harm an individual or his or her family. The crime can become a felony if the target of the threat reasonably believes that he or she is in danger, or if a member of the target’s immediate family reasonably believes that the intended target is in danger.

Booth said another technique to stop offensive letters is to get the celebrity’s agent to write the person sending the letters.

“The representative writes that the mail to the celebrity comes to our agency and the celebrity has not seen any of your letters and you would not be able to make contact with her if you came here.

“It’s a turnoff. If you can get something to them that they are not talking to this individual, sometimes they will give up.”

Detective Ed Brimmer of the Los Angeles Police Department’s criminal conspiracy section, the main unit investigating threatening communications, said threatening letters often are distinctive.

“You’d have to be blind to miss them,” he said. “They all have kinds of graffiti or goofy-looking characters, spaceships or who knows what on them,” he said.

Brimmer said he has trained employees in the city mail room to handle the letters.

“They are to take it and put it in a big plastic bag we have given them,” he said. “We would take the letter in the hopes that you could get a fingerprint off it.

“But most of the time the girl opens it with a knife and reads it and then realizes it’s a letter from someone exhibiting bizarre behavior. We probably don’t get fingerprints very often.”

Brimmer said once the department gets the threatening letter or, in some cases, a recording of a telephoned threat, detection becomes a “chess game.”

“You never know when the next move is going to be made. He has highs and lows. His actions seem energized. We will get lots of communications. They seem to self-aggrandize. One man said: ‘I have the ability to poison all the food, all the water in the San Fernando Valley. I have special training.’ Their imagination sets the limits.

“After you listen to that for a while, you know what you are dealing with.”

Brimmer said his layman’s observation is that a person who makes anonymous threats is far less dangerous than one who signs his name and takes a step toward fulfilling the threat.

“The anonymous person who makes the bomb threat is a non-confrontative person and he’s doing it to be vindictive,” Brimmer said.

“He does not have the ability to make the bomb,” Brimmer said. That person, however, senses exhilaration through “the commotion it causes and the mass evacuation of the building and the calling of the Police Department,” Brimmer said.

“It’s a person who is relatively powerless exercising great, great power.

“The guy who signs his name is a lot sicker. He will go down to the station with a knife or if you talk to him he will tell you there are forces which tell him to do that--some guiding light or his mother in outer space.”

Capt. Dennis A. Conte, commanding officer of the Police Department’s detective support division, said a well-publicized threat always raises worries about another.

“They seem to be trends,” he said. “Look at the freeway shootings, for example. We have seen mass-killings nationwide where they seem to happen one after the other.”

Brimmer said the man threatening Bradley over the issue of employee weekends “gets very nasty and racial.”

“He calls here any number of times. We have had a running relationship with him.

“I explained to him one time on the phone that I took care of the mayor’s itinerary so if he wanted to have an audience with the mayor, just say where and when. I was trying to bring him in,” said Lee Castruita, a detective in the criminal conspiracy section.

“He stopped calling when he realized we were trying to trace the calls,” Brimmer said.

“It sounds like he’s an older man who’s unbalanced. I’m not a clinician, but the kind of stuff he’s talking about, he’s got to have a problem.”

Brimmer said the man who threatened the Valley’s food and water supply sent letters to the city from many postmarks.

“My way of communicating with him was to run an ad in the Daily News. I ran it for 10 or 12 days and assured him that I had received his correspondence.

“I would not hear from him and then he’d write me another letter and let me know what he wanted me to do.

“In one ad I asked where we could make the money drop. I think I was going to wrap it in a canvas bag and throw it out of a car heading west on the Ventura Freeway near White Oak.

“We were not going to use real money. We might get $100 and wrap it around paper. You tell him whatever you can get away with.

“In one letter he said I should meet him at Fallbrook Mall. Then another letter said he had warned me about not staking out the location and he was over there and saw police looking for him. I am sure he was just trying to pull our chain because on the information we had, we had too big an area to even attempt to find him.”

Brimmer said that because most of the man’s geographical references were from the Valley, he believed that the writer lived there. One of the markets he threatened to poison was in the Fallbrook Mall.

“After about six months, he finally just stopped. From the kind of nonsense we were playing, I estimated he was a male Caucasian, 60 to 70 years old, probably retired, sitting at home with very little to do and that he became very interested in this cat-and-mouse game.

“It started as extortion, but he never attempted to collect the money. I had to rule out real criminal intent. I thought it was fun-and-games time for him.”

Authorities also decided no serious threat was posed by the San Jose-area man who threatened a major producer and his wife if the man did not get the lead role in the producer’s movie.

Conte said he did not want to use the producer’s name in the event somebody reads the story “and decides to make another attempt.”

He said the writer made “no death threat, but there was a veiled threat we needed to pursue. I think the innuendo was a threat of bodily harm.

“We immediately contacted the representatives of this celebrity and made an appointment to meet with them to find out how this threat came to the producer’s attention.

“We found out the man who made the threat lived in a small town outside San Jose. We learned that he had been found not fit to stand trial for murder and had been been paroled from Atascadero State Hospital.”

Brimmer said he asked a friend on the San Jose Police Department to interview the man.

“The officer phoned back that it was difficult to determine whether the man was harmless, but that he had not broken any laws,” Brimmer said.

No charges were filed. “There was nothing we could do,” Conte said. “He was not within that area that required incarceration or hospitalization.”

When the producer’s security staff traveled to San Jose to talk to the police, they received photos and a physical description of the man and a report on the police interview.

The man remains under close supervision by a parole officer.